K-Tell Hell (slight return)

With the summer over and Angie back in school again, I was home during the day with mom and our German Shepherd, Sadie. Mom would often slap albums on the turntable for our enjoyment, if not a way to keep me entertained and not in front of the TV all day. For some odd reason, she always seemed to grab the K-Tel and Ronco compilation albums, and play them all the way through. As noted in a related blog, a lot of the stuff was garbage, but there were also some gems to found amongst the trash.

This was one that had a few good cuts among some other stuff I'd just as soon forget about. My favorite cut on this was "Wildwood Weed" by Jim Stafford; I had a very vague knowledge of this one being about a bunch of good ol' boys discovering a certain green, leafy plant growing on the farm (such was my upbringing). This was followed by Golden Earring's "Radar Love" and Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama".

This was another one with a couple of tolerable cuts on it; I always found it amusing they put Dr. Hook's "Cover of The Rolling Stone" on here with its cartoony references to drugs and groupies next to things like "Funky Worm" and "Love Train". One song on here that I absolutely detested was Clint Holmes' "Playground In My Mind", with the dreaded chorus about "My name is Michael, I got a nickel...". Mom would always say, "That's Mikey's favorite song!", just because it had my name in it, but this was farther from the truth than you could imagine. After the last number of months of quite an interesting mix of stuff I'd been hearing lately, this song was nowhere near being any kind of favorite!

I wrote about the Fun Rock album in the last blog, but after hearing "Gitarzan" by Ray Stevens, I found the album by that name in Dad's collection. There was a picture of Ray himself on the cover, but I remember thinking that he was Alan Alda from M*A*S*H!

One last related album that came our way was something called Merry Snoopy's Christmas, a sort of compilation of songs by The Royal Guardsmen and other stuff that was kind of tied together to make a Christmas-themed album. I don't remember much of it apart from the opening cut, "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron", which quickly became a favorite.

Lately, some of Geoffrey's favorites have been cuts from some of the other K-Tel albums I have since picked up for cheap along the lines while on vinyl hunts over the years. Some of his favorites are cuts by Ray Stevens, "Mah-Nah-Mah-Nah", the Pink Panther theme, and "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" (he got excited about it when I told him that the song was about Snoopy!).